The Internet has become a common publication medium. The increased availability of various web-publishing tools has provided avenues for the publication of articles ranging from technical journals to personal web pages. These personal web pages often include hyperlinks, or simply links. In some instances, the links may represent other web pages, a particular application that is to be launched, or an email address. In fact, links to email addresses have become quite ubiquitous. In addition to appearing as links, email addresses also appear on published web pages as basic text.
The ubiquity of email addresses, and other personal information, on the Internet also has its disadvantages. For example, the personal information is often harvested from the Internet by various individuals that wish to send mass unsolicited email (also referred to as “spam”). These individuals (also referred to as “spammers”) write programs (also referred to as “robots” or “bots”) that trawl the Internet for published email addresses. Once the bots identify an email address, the bots store the email address in a database. The stored email address then becomes the target of spam. As one can predict, if the bots can properly identify email addresses of various individuals, then the vulnerability to spam increases for those individuals.
In order to prevent such bots from identifying email addresses, individuals have attempted to mask their email addresses using various approaches. In one such approach, an email address (“name@domain.com”) is re-written so that it does not appear as an email address (“name at domain dot com”). However, such approaches are not very elegant, and reduce the aesthetics of a published web page. In view of this deficiency, a need exists in the industry.